Foundation AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICALLyon is asking counselors to describethe mental health problems they see, theresources they lack and how much timethey have for professional development.

He is also asking such time-management
and triage questions as, “If you have
more referrals than space on your
caseload, how do you decide whom
to see?” and “What therapy factors
do you believe are most important or
likely to result in client improvement?”
He will also lay the foundation for the
development of a digital monitoring
system to help counselors track their
students’ progress.

Lyon hopes his findings will inform
other providers who triage children’s
mental health problems, such as
pediatricians. Once he has completed
the pilot study, Lyon plans to apply for
National Institute of Mental Health
funding to expand his research into
other schools.

“I am driven to make sure that kidsand families get services they need andthat they are evidence-based and likelyto be effective,” says Lyon. ;

Read more about the Pearson EarlyCareer Grant at www.apa.org/apf/funding/ pearson.aspx. The deadline forthe 2013 grant is Dec. 31.

Gerson grant will explore‘low differentiation of self’

APF has presented
a $6,000 Randy
Gerson Memorial
Grant to Christine
Paprocki for
her research on
people with “low
differentiation of
self,” or difficulty
separating their

Grantee spotlight: The mystery of ‘twice exceptionality’

“Twice exceptional children” — those who are gifted and struggle with a learning
disability — often have trouble learning in traditional classrooms. But there’s
scant research on how to improve their learning. With a $75,000 Esther Katz
Rosen Grant from the American Psychological Foundation, Jeffrey Gilger, PhD,
is working to fill that research gap by using fMRI to look more closely at how
these children process information.

In one study, Gilger, a psychology professor at the University of California,Merced, compared the spatial visualization processing skills of twice exceptionalchildren with those of children who are either gifted or have reading disabilities.

He found that twice exceptional children are not a mix of reading disabled and
gifted brains; rather, they process spatial visualization problems differently than
either group. He also found that the brains of reading disabled children are
similar to those of twice exceptional children when they perform verbal and
spatial tasks.

“The neurodevelopmental processes that make a child reading disabled mightmake a child [gifted] as well, given the right context and factors,” he says.

Gilger’s APF-funded research has led to further studies on how children withreading disabilities learn spatial problem-solving and on whether teaching thesechildren spatial problem-solving would be more successful when they are veryyoung.

The Esther Katz Rosen Fund offers annual grants to early career researcherswho study gifted children. The application deadline for the 2013 fellowship isMarch 1. For more information, visit www.apa.org/apf/funding/rosen.aspx.